Services

Overview

Your business doesn't stand still – it evolves. All companies have a business cycle—from a startup to a mature company, and each stage presents its own set of opportunities and challenges. Aline Consulting advisers understand what it takes for you to be successful at each stage of your business, whether you are looking to grow, or expand internationally, strengthen, or to exit part of your business.

We are an innovation leader, propelled by the imperative to reimagine solutions to our clients' large-scale and complex challenges. We are a company with bigger ideas, and for more than 15 years, we have been essential partners to some of the biggest organizations in the world. And yet, our innovation philosophy hinges on four small beliefs. Innovation is necessary for sustainable growth. Building new value is about more than just building new things. New ideas are born from experience. And the brightest future belongs to those organizations who adapt and change.

We're dedicated to working with businesses like yours. It's all we do. Whether you're an entrepreneur, family business, or a fast-growing company, we understand what's important to you. We can help you navigate your challenges—no matter the size and stage of your business.

Application Support

Aline offers stability, performance and functionality across an ever-increasing range of legacy, hosted and proprietary systems. With our customized services, you can unlock system potential without additional cost burdens. Through optimized service portfolios, flexible solutions deployments and integrated engagement models – you can achieve measurable business improvements as high as 40%. We are consistently rated top on Customer Satisfaction, Expertise, Flexibility, Reliability and Ownership.

Application Support delivers the IT service to users within an organization that enables the required business processes needed for the business to be successful. By default it means that Application Support enables people to execute their responsibilities within their relevant business processes without problems.

It requires quick and knowledgeable service delivery to people both on a business level and IT level of understanding, acting as the primary point of contact to correct systems issues that can disrupt the critical business service they depend upon and that threaten business continuity.

In addition to the technical knowhow, real time availability, excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, and a great customer service attitude are needed in order to provide the level of Application Support required by fast moving business today.

Fixing problems is just one facet of providing Application Support, it could be said that a more important role is that of being able identify patterns of failure and do root cause analysis to find the more deep lying problem. Correcting a root cause will result in overall less issues, less business disturbance and less user frustration, all things that are barriers to gaining full business value from the solutions in use.

Aline's strengths in this area stem from our long experience working closely with the business and IT stakeholders from our clients, understanding the overall business needs and the criticality of business support systems. These things, when added to our technical expertise enable us to seamlessly work with your organization to anticipate potential issues, identify the underlying causes and resolve them, as part of a continuous improvement methodology.

Strategy Consulting

In today's fast changing dynamic global business landscape organizations various from big to small are under tremendous pressure to transform themselves. A direct consequence is the continuous cycle of Mergers, Acquisitions, Divestitures and Reinventions that the organizations undertake to beat the competition and come out on top. Each of these strategies presents itself new challenges right from people to day-to-day operations to systems. Aline works with executive management at CxO, VP and Sr Director Levels to clearly define adoptable strategies and turn them into actionable results.

Aline serves as a strategic partner to various clients, developing innovative approaches that challenge the norm and drive positive change for various business units enterprise-wide. Our difference lies in building deep, meaningful relationships with key stakeholders, leaders and various personnel to implement successful strategic initiatives and bring those intofruition, yielding successful outcomes.

Our professionals are highly team-oriented with deep strategic insights and the ability to leverage consultative thinking into pragmatic solutions that optimize business processes and have always thrived in fast-paced, supportive environment.

Vision is the Destination and Strategy is the Route

Understanding market trends, drivers, market position and combining these things with a vision of the desired future state, enables an organization to develop actionable strategies to create measurable long-term value.

This includes establishing a framework for sustained innovation and growth which can be anything from an incremental product enhancement to capitalizing on identified market opportunities, to a seismic shift in a company's direction and focus.

Being able to see order in the chaos of a dynamic business environment is key to making the right strategic decisions. Whether it is in the area of market entry and implementation, an untapped growth opportunity, definition of a growth plan(organic or via mergers and acquisitions) or commercial and supply chain operational excellence, being able to recognize what is the right path out of many possibilities is the key to defining and implementing a successful strategy.

Aline is your preferred and trusted partner to help you to clarify your vision of the future and build the strategic map to your new future.

Business Process Redesign

Aline's Operational Improvement team works with management, the board and key constituents to develop and implement value enhancing solutions tailored to meet specific needs. We have uniquely skilled personnel and resources that are required to help maximize stakeholder value. Our professionals are prepared to address challenging business problems utilizing an analytical approach to identify the changes necessary to achieve sustainable economic value. Aline has the expertise to facilitate revenue enhancement, business and organizational alignment, supply chain management, operational improvement, post-merger integration, post-emergence management and SG&A efficiency. Our professionals have extensive industry backgrounds and credentials and have served in both advisory and interim management roles as CEO, CRO, CFO or as a member of the board of directors. Aline's services are provided by proven senior executives who have a demonstrated track record of helping businesses and their stakeholders reengineer the fundamental manner in which they operate, such that substantial and lasting profitability improvement can be achieved.

Turning Strategy into Action

The most important factor in the success of any business process reengineering effort is the ability to understand the detailed business needs.

A detailed analysis via a series of inclusive and open sessions should be held with all the relevant process owners and stakeholders, always remembering to align the defined needs with the overall strategy and vision.

This is where a consensus of the ideal business process in all the different areas under analysis can be achieved. It's vital to identify where the business process changes will add value and/or increase efficiency and where changes to the business process would not add value and actually create more disturbance than is necessary.

Once you have conceptualized the ideal business process for the organization it is possible to build a business process model.Understanding the capabilities of underlying IT support solutions and organizational capabilities also requires careful assessment and analysis as this will also help to shape the final business process to be implemented.

Business process reengineering is not a single cycle but rather a continuous improvement action that an organization should be able to be agile enough to perform to anticipate or react to changes in the business or the business strategy.

Aline has long experience of working hand in hand with key business and operational stakeholders to build that capability, including the associated implementation, communication and organizational change management.

Change Management

Shifting a culture requires a delicate, systematic, and well-planned approach to avoid failure and affect positive change. Aline's unique tailored approach solutions can help guide your organization through the necessary transition, ensuring you are ready for change, are prepared to lead the change, and are able to validate the change. We perform Change Readiness Assessment, prepare practical Change Management Action Plan, work with you to implement the plan and measure Change Monitoring including reinforcement.

Creating the Culture of Change

It should be recognized that successful business transformations are achieved only when they are supported by informed, empowered and enthusiastic stakeholders. A good solution will not reap the benefits it was implemented to achieve if the organization does not understand, support and believe in it.

The objective of the change management effort is not to enable the implementation of a specific change, rather it is create a change process and culture within an organization that enables continuous improvement initiatives and the agility to adjust to changes in vision and strategy.

A clear and unambiguous vision of the future from the leadership of an organization is always the guiding light for any change. It should be the measure against which actions are measured but, as part of continuous improvement, the vision itself should be checked and validated in a regular cycle.

Identifying the relevant stakeholder groups and performing both change impact and change readiness assessments enables the change manager and change agents to properly plan communication and engagement activities to support the stakeholders throughout the change process.

Empowering respected representatives to lead the engagement effort in their own field allows open and frank dialogue and creates ownership of change and understanding of the reasons for it.

Ultimately the good habits that are learned as an integral part of the change process become a new way of working for an organization and can enable it to refine further and realize additional benefits.

Aline's professionals have been fully engaged in both business and organizational transformations in leading roles, working with both organizational leadership and operational stakeholders at all levels.
The experience we have gained from the successes that we have achieved in this field uniquely position Aline to be your partner in change enablement.

Project Management

Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria.

Projects are typically temporary endeavors with a fixed scope and a fixed timeline, so unlike day to day IT or Business Operations, they have a specific plan with a clear delivery point.

There are multiple methodologies used in Project Management and delivery including the more traditional "Waterfall" approach and the flexible "Agile" way of working.

In any case, there is a need for a strong, knowledgeable and highly committed Project Manager to run any project. Their main duties being to ensure that the goals of the project are met, so the cost, quality and schedule are balanced, the dependencies within the project are understood and managed, adequate resources are in place to deliver the project, the status of the project is honestly reported via the project governance process and, ultimately, to ensure that the outcome meets the clients expectations.

Great attention to detail, the ability to plan, see the big picture and identify barriers to success, a supportive leadership style combined with ability to show authority when needed and outstanding communication skills are all vital assets for a great Project Manager.

Aline's enviable record in successful project delivery, is in great part due to the quality of the project managers that we bring to any engagement. Our project managers are capable and committed and enable our clients to focus on achieving their business goals rather than the running of the project designed to deliver them

Solution Implementation

Our services are designed for rapid installation, configuration and roll-out. We focus on delivering value by providing you with immediate results, minimal start-up or disruption time, and operational cost savings. This provides you with timely delivery of solutions focused on your needs with lasting value and impact. Our supporting methodology and project management skills ensure appropriate attention to detail, timeliness, and cost. Aline also offers comprehensive services to support the full scope of your initiatives utilizing expertise learned in over 500+ implementations.

Successful Technology Implementations require that projects are delivered on time, on-budget, and the client is fully satisfied with the end result. The delivery team must also provide confidence to the client that business continuity is secure and that the expected benefits will not be negatively impacted by poor implementation.

The final delivery stage is actually he last step in a process that must be followed carefully if success to be assured.

First we work with your stakeholders at all levels to identify the real business requirements are clear, well defined and aligned with your overall vision and strategy. This requires commitment from all levels of the organization to engage in open and unambiguous dialogue

Once those requirements are clarified and fixed, and the technical design needed to support those requirements is finalized, an aggressive but realistic timeframe for the design, development, testing and implementation can be agreed and the different work streams aligned into a comprehensive implementation plan.

Honest, rather than optimistic, assessment of progress indicators as part of regular project governance allow bottlenecks and pinch points to be spotted early and corrective actions or extra effort employed to get things back on track when needed.

As the final stages of the implementation begin, structured test planning for unit testing, integration testing and, finally, user acceptance is required to ensure that all the pieces of the puzzle are working as designed, working together and giving the required result.

Once the testing phase is complete and signed off, the move to the live environment can be planned and executed, again, ensuring the minimal disturbance to business and with built in roll back planning as an extra safety measure.

Aline has an enviably record of successfully managing such technology implementations to the satisfaction of our clients. We are your best choice when it comes to implementation reliability combined with security of business continuity.

About Us

We are a supply chain transformation consulting company helping organizations align their end-to-end supply chain processes towards their strategic and operational objectives.